François Furet: A melancholy revisionist?

When asked to write an intellectual biography of François Furet, Christophe Prochasson surely knew he faced a daunting task. Twenty-five years ago, as France celebrated the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and communist domination of Eastern Europe crumbled, Furet’s reputation and influence stood at a pinnacle. No one had done more than he to wrest the interpretation of the Revolution from the Marxist historians who in his view had shoehorned it into a Procrustean bed of party-sanctioned dogma, and no one had done more to explore “the past of an illusion” that had induced so many young French intellectuals, including himself, to devote years of their lives to the party. Because the demise of communism defined the epoch, the crown of epochal historian devolved on Furet.

A quarter of a century later, the landscape looks rather different. The pastness of the past has reasserted itself, and many people today must find it difficult to imagine that interpreting the French Revolution “correctly” could once have seemed a vital prerequisite to situating oneself properly in the present. Academic historians—a tribe among whom Furet lived at best uncomfortably—prefer it this way. A hundred interpretive schools have bloomed, and none is in danger of achieving the ideological hegemony that academics fear more than the seductions of historiographic fashion or the curse of antiquarian irrelevance. In a sense, the very magnitude of Furet’s success has become an obstacle to understanding what he achieved or why he thought it important. This, as Prochasson suggests, was one source of the “melancholy” under the sign of which he sets his essay in biography.

That said, the choice of “melancholy” as a unifying thread for a book about Furet might seem strange. How could a historian who had accumulated celebrity, influence, institutional power, and professional acclaim be described as melancholy? To be sure, every life contains its share of private disappointments and frustrated ambitions, but Prochasson has almost nothing to say about either Furet’s private life or the battles in which he engaged as head of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). We do learn that Furet suffered as a young man from tuberculosis, which left him confined to a sanatorium for lengthy periods. This enforced confinement proved to be a boon to the young scholar. The sanatorium contained a library of 25,000 books and provided a quiet environment in which to read them and prepare a licence en droit. His conversion to history came while still convalescing, when he forged ties with a number of young communist history students who would remain lifelong friends, including Mona and Jacques Ozouf, Alain Besançon, Maurice Agulhon, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

Furet’s initial engagement with history thus coincided with his initial engagement with communism, the story of which comprises the first fifth of the book. We learn little about Furet’s activities as a militant. Very likely what Le Roy Ladurie says of himself—that adherence to the party was the cure for his “Robinsonism,” his “love-hate relationship with solitude”— was also true of Furet. Alain Besançon recalls the keen pleasure of conversations among comrades in a left-wing student milieu freed from the oppressive conformism of Sciences-Po. It was in the Saint-Just Cell that Furet met his first wife, Jeannette Rouil. In the same milieu, Denis Richet, with whom he would later collaborate on the book that first gained him notoriety, met and married Furet’s sister. Whatever else communism may have meant to Furet, it provided him with a network of close friends with similar intellectual and political interests, and this, as much as any ideological attraction, must have complicated his exit from its orbit. Prochasson adds the interesting observation that, in the French academic world in the 1950s, communism functioned as “une savonnette à vilains: the sorbonnard Furet, who had failed to join the normalienne nobility, found another way in by way of political commitment” to communism. [48...